I wanted for a while to write about using MySQL Partitioning for Performance Optimization and I just got a relevant customer case to illustrate it. First you need to understand how partitions work internally. Partitions are on the low level are separate table. This means when you’re doing lookup by partitioned key you will look [...]
Moving from MyISAM to Innodb or XtraDB. Basics
I do not know if it is because we’re hosting a free webinar on migrating MyISAM to Innodb or some other reason but recently I see a lot of questions about migration from MyISAM to Innodb. Webinar will cover the process in a lot more details though I would like to go over basics in [...]
Tuning InnoDB Concurrency Tickets
InnoDB has an oft-unused parameter innodb_concurrency_tickets that seems widely misunderstood. From the docs: “The number of threads that can enter InnoDB concurrently is determined by the innodb_thread_concurrency variable. A thread is placed in a queue when it tries to enter InnoDB if the number of threads has already reached the concurrency limit. When a thread [...]
InnoDB TABLE/INDEX stats
In Released and new coming features I did not mentioned two additional INFORMATION_SCHEMA tables available in XtraDB: It is INNODB_TABLE_STATS INNODB_INDEX_STATS These table show statistics about InnoDB tables ( taken from InnoDB data dictionary). INNODB_TABLE_STATS is | table_name | table name in InnoDB internal style (‘database/table’) | | rows | estimated number of all rows [...]
When the subselect runs faster
A few weeks ago, we had a query optimization request from one of our customer. The query was very simple like:
1 | SELECT * FROM `table` WHERE (col1='A'||col1='B') ORDER BY id DESC LIMIT 20 OFFSET 0 |
This column in the table is looks like this:
1 | `col1` enum('A','B','C','CD','DE','F','G','HI') default NULL |
The table have 549252 rows and of course, there is an index on the col1. MySQL estimated the cardinality of that index as [...]
Multi Column indexes vs Index Merge
The mistake I commonly see among MySQL users is how indexes are created. Quite commonly people just index individual columns as they are referenced in where clause thinking this is the optimal indexing strategy. For example if I would have something like AGE=18 AND STATE=’CA’ they would create 2 separate indexes on AGE and STATE [...]
High-Performance Click Analysis with MySQL
We have a lot of customers who do click analysis, site analytics, search engine marketing, online advertising, user behavior analysis, and many similar types of work. The first thing these have in common is that they’re generally some kind of loggable event. The next characteristic of a lot of these systems (real or planned) is [...]
How adding another table to JOIN can improve performance ?
JOINs are expensive and it most typical the fewer tables (for the same database) you join the better performance you will get. As for any rules there are however exceptions The one I’m speaking about comes from the issue with MySQL optimizer stopping using further index key parts as soon as there is a range [...]
Enum Fields VS Varchar VS Int + Joined table: What is Faster?
Really often in customers’ application we can see a huge tables with varchar/char fields, with small sets of possible values. These are “state”, “gender”, “status”, “weapon_type”, etc, etc. Frequently we suggest to change such fields to use ENUM column type, but is it really necessary (from performance standpoint)? In this post I’d like to present [...]
Innodb Performance Optimization Basics
Interviewing people for our Job Openings I like to ask them a basic question – if you have a server with 16GB of RAM which will be dedicated for MySQL with large Innodb database using typical Web workload what settings you would adjust and interestingly enough most people fail to come up with anything reasonable. [...]

